On the Use of CGI in Michael Snow's *Corpus Callosum

The Child in the Machine: On the Use of CGI in Michael Snow’s *Corpus Callosum MALCOLM TURVEY The most highly developed earthly man is very like the child. —Novalis There’s a fashionable idea now, especially among academic theorists, that the person—the subject, as they say these days—is totally culturally shaped. I don’t believe that at all. I think somebody is born, that there is an organism that has functions. It can be twisted; it can be hurt; but there’s still a specific person there. —Michael Snow Elsewhere, I have suggested that Michael Snow’s experimentation with computer-generated imagery (CGI) in *Corpus Callosum (2002) returns to and extends some of the cinema’s earliest traditions.1 In particular, Snow’s film shares a sensibility with experimental film of the 1910s and 1920s, what Annette Michelson describes as a euphoric sense of “ludic sovereignty” over space and time.2 Just as a filmmaker such as Dziga Vertov self-consciously revels in his films in what was then the novel power over time granted by film, so Snow just as self- consciously revels in *Corpus Callosum in the new power over space enabled by digital, thereby suggesting that, for all of its novelty, the use of digital technolo- gies in filmmaking will be driven by some of the same basic drives and desires that have motivated much cinematic art over the last one hundred or so years, such as the desire for control over space and time. Experimental film of the 1910s and 1920s is not the only cinematic tradition that *Corpus Callosum returns to and extends. As other commentators have noted, its use of CGI to comically manipulate the human body bears more than a passing resemblance to one of the cinema’s earliest forms of entertainment, slapstick comedy, which emerged during the cinema’s first period, the so-called cinema of attractions (1896–1904). 1. “Dr. Tube and Mr. Snow,” Millennium Film Journal 43–44 (Summer 2005). I have occasionally bor- rowed an odd sentence or two from this article. 2. Annette Michelson, “The Wings of Hypothesis: On Montage and the Theory of the Interval,” in OCTOBER 114, Fall 2005, pp. 29–42. © 2005 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228705774889600 by guest on 25 September 2021 30 OCTOBER The word “slapstick,” as Alan Dale reminds us, derives from an implement—“the double paddles formerly used by cir- cus clowns to beat each other. The loud crack of the two paddle blades as they crashed together could always be depended upon to produce the laughter and applause.” . For comedy to register as slapstick, you need only the fall, and its flipside, the blow. The essence of a slapstick gag is a physical assault on, or collapse of, the hero’s dignity.3 In Snow’s film, literal falls and blows performed by his actors are blended with a variety of computer-generated ones that assault the dignity of the human body and are accompanied on the soundtrack by electronic equivalents of the crack of the slapstick paddle. Once inside the office in which most of the film takes place, there begins a series of slow tracking shots edited together into a continuous loop, with the camera repeatedly tracking across the space of the office from left to right, starting and stopping each time in roughly the same places. During each track, one or more computer-generated assaults on the body occur along with various electronic noises. In the first, the foot of a worker becomes stuck to the ground; in the second (which is reminiscent of the sight gags about race in silent slapstick), a white man hands some papers to a black coworker—slowly the black man turns white as the white man turns black; in the third, an electric current leaps out of a computer, electrifying a group of workers who fall to the ground—one of Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992), p. 65. 3. Alan Dale, Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 1, 3. Above and facing page: Michael Snow. *Corpus Callosum. 2002. Courtesy the artist and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228705774889600 by guest on 25 September 2021 The Child in the Machine 31 them then performs a partial handstand as if still electrified; and in the fifth, the image is twisted in the middle, like a bow tie, turning it upside down, with a woman, also upside-down, lying unconscious on the floor. The assault intensifies in a second series of tracks, and is given a more explicitly sexual and sadistic inflection. As the camera passes a man, his penis expands from the fly of his trousers across the width of the office until it meets the exposed arse of a woman waiting, doggy-style, on top of a desk—a bell rings and the penis suddenly contracts as the woman is returned in fast motion to her seat. A man grabs and begins twisting the arm of another man; the action is then enhanced by some digital twisting, first of the twisted arm, then of the man’s entire body. The first man then proceeds to whip the second with his belt before they part, blowing kisses to each other. The body of a plump woman is expanded across the width of the office until, like a balloon, it bursts. A man and a woman enter the door of a bathroom and are squeezed together—when they emerge, they are still squeezed together in the rectangular shape of the doorway as they awkwardly shuffle back to the office. As these examples suggest, Snow uses CGI in his film to expand, contract, twist, squeeze, fold, invert, transform, and in gen- eral wreak havoc on the human body. Although it does not have a narrative, *Corpus Callosum also employs some of the conventions of comedian comedy, which took shape as slapstick evolved into the longer, narrative chase films and one- and two-reelers of the later 1900s and 1910s. These conventions were extended further in animated films and are still used today in comedian comedy and cartoons. As Steve Seidman has shown in his seminal study of the genre, one of its major conventions is what he calls its “extrafictionality,” the foregrounding of film’s artificiality through a variety of Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228705774889600 by guest on 25 September 2021 32 OCTOBER means such as exposing “the materiality of sound and image.”4 To t ake one of any number of possible examples from the genre’s history, in Laurel and Hardy’s parodic Western Way Out West (1937), the boys are in a bar when a cowboy begins to sing. They chime in, too, and all goes well until the diminutive Laurel suddenly starts harmonizing in the implausibly low bass voice of a large man. Hardy, confounded, borrows a wooden mallet from the bartender and hits Laurel on the head. But rather than stop, Laurel continues singing, this time in the equally implausible falsetto voice of a woman, before finally fainting. This scene exposes the materiality of the soundtrack not only by overtly dubbing the voices of a man and woman onto Laurel’s, but also by having Hardy explicitly call attention to the dubbing from within the film’s diegesis. The scene also exemplifies another way in which comedian comedy films foreground their artificiality. Rather than act as if the viewer does not exist and the fictional world of the film is real, as is the norm in most genres, comedians tend to acknowledge the viewer’s existence. When Laurel begins to sing in that impossibly bass voice, Hardy, as was his cus- tom, looks into the camera at the viewer with a mixture of bewilderment and 4. Steve Seidman, Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film (Ann Arbor, MI.: UMI Research Press, 1981), p. 35. Laurel and Hardy. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228705774889600 by guest on 25 September 2021 The Child in the Machine 33 frustration.5 Other comedians talk to the viewer, such as Groucho Marx in Animal Crackers (1930), who heaps abuse on Margaret Dumont’s character Mrs. Rittenhouse in various asides to the camera. A final convention of the genre worth mentioning in the context of Snow’s film is the way it traffics in what Seidman calls “identity confusion.” Comedians are often confused with, or disguised as, others, taking on aspects of their identities, and comedian comedy is replete with doubles. For instance, Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor (1963) plays both Professor Julius Kelp and his alter-ego, Buddy Love. This convention has been enhanced by CGI in recent films such as The Mask (1994), in which Jim Carey plays nice, conventional Stanley, whose repressed Id is liberated when he is digitally transformed by a magi- cal mask into an anarchic trickster. And in Being John Malkovich (1999), Mr. Malkovich is digitally duplicated ad infinitum. All of these conventions are evident in *Corpus Callosum. To start with, the film foregrounds its artificiality because Snow usually makes no effort to hide his computer-generated effects. As other commentators have noted, many of the digital manipulations Snow employs are overt, even crude. They are not, for the most part, blended seamlessly with the recorded elements of the shot in which they occur, as they typically are in mainstream narrative films.

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